Excerpt from The Influence of History on Individual and National Action The living present is the time for action; but the actions of men are often prompted by the remembrance of the past and controlled by considerations of the future. Consider for a moment those acts that make history; that will remain like mountains of granite, when ordinary actions are swept on to oblivion, as the fine dust of the earth is borne on by the rapid streams, to be buried in the bottom of the ocean. What mighty influences combined to call such actions forth; to give them power and shape, until they took their place in the his tory of the world, dividing it into epochs and giving it charac ter as Alpine chains and solitary mountains give variety and grandeur to the surface of the globe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.